In general the present disclosure pertains to methods applied in the field of e-commerce, which is commonly defined as types of industries where the buying and selling of products or services is conducted over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. E-commerce today is often directly related to Mobile Commerce, which broadly involves the delivering of e-commerce capabilities to consumers accessing those capabilities on mobile electronic devices, like smartphones and mobile tablet computers, via wireless technologies.
An increasing percentage of customer and user e-commerce activities are now conducted on mobile devices, as e-commerce companies and customers seek faster and more convenient ways to access and deliver products and services.
E-commerce companies in various market sectors, including online retail, dating websites, social networking, social shopping, lifestyle and survey websites, among others, attempt to gather data from customers and users in the course of doing business.
E-commerce customers search for products and services and input profile and preferences data daily on desktop, laptop, and mobile computing devices, in the course of engaging with the websites, mobile applications, and other software environments of e-commerce companies in a variety of market sectors.
In order to find what they are looking for, e-commerce customers must often search through a multitude of options and must often enter a lot of information on a website, mobile application, or other software environment to achieve a desired result.
The process of shopping online for a pair of shoes, describing member preferences on a lifestyle portal website, filling out an online survey, or engaging with a social shopping engine often requires a large number of steps: clicks of a mouse, or taps on a touch screen, entry of data into boxes, scrolling through pages, etc.
For the e-commerce customer, going through these processes and finding the options most relevant to them can often be daunting, time consuming, and sometimes ineffective.
For the e-commerce company, gathering specific preference data from customers, generally considered an essential function of e-commerce business, can be time-consuming, expensive, and often ineffective as well.